Barcamp London 13

I posted last year about my visit to this event. I enjoyed it so much that I was keen to go again. The idea is that people can turn up and do a talk on any topic they choose. It is up to the audience to decide which ones they want to attend.

After the introductory talk you can write your topic on a card and post it to the grid. There are a number of strands in different rooms, so you cannot see everything. The venue is a college next to the Tottenham Hotspurs stadium at White Hart Lane in London. I got there by train and that is not a bad journey for me. The event itself is free thanks to their sponsors, but you do have to book a ticket.

There were about a hundred people there with a pretty diverse crowd. There were more women than some might expect and a mix of gender pronouns and sexualities. I hope they find it a welcoming environment.

Last time I gave a talk about Hive, but I did not do one this time, partly due to my bad back meaning I would rather sit and listen. They do encourage participation though and I asked my share of questions. It was a chance to see @lloyddavis again who I have met at a few of our blockchain events. Another Hiver is @edent who was helping run it, but he has not used the platform much.

My first session was about AI generated music. The guy used the sites Suno and Udio that can generate music from a text prompt. I have to say that the results were impressive, but as a musician and songwriter I have mixed feelings about this technology.

The next one was on supercomputers from someone who manages one for researchers. He is dealing with thousands of processors that can work on vast sets of data. This is very different from general IT.

Some of the sessions are just open discussions on a topic and the next was this format about home automation. This can be good to learn from the experience of others. Most of the people seem to use Home Assistant that I have experimented with previously and I may use again now I that have more devices.

Next was lunch. The catering is excellent with pastries on arrival and drinks available all day. Lunch was a variery of sandwiches, wraps and salads. The breaks are a good opportunity to chat with people. To encourage this the organisers provided 'bingo' cards of people you had to find, such as someone who shares you birthday or speaks a certain language. There were trickier ones such as someone who had travelled in time or ridden a unicorn. This was open to interpretation. There were some Lego prizes to be won for filling all the boxes.

After lunch I was in a discussion about running with main organiser Paul who has written a book about his experiences. He was giving out free copies to attendees. One of the other guys has volunteered at the London Marathon so it was interesting to hear about that. You may notice the sticker and 3d-printed object. People bring such items along to give out. Geeks like stickers for their laptops.

Next was about managing online communities. This was by Alan Pope, aka Popey, who has done this job at Ubuntu Linux. He talked about free software called Savannah that can monitor multiple sources such as Discord and Github to track who is contributing to a project. It should be possible to integrate this with Hive too if anyone needs that sort of tool.

Then there was another open discussion about managing your digital legacy, which is something I have thought about. We all have accounts on various services that we may want others to take over if anything should happen to us. Do you have a plan for what would happen to your Hive account? You need a secure way to hand on the keys.

I could have gone to various other talks that looked interesting, but had to make a decision. The final one was about generating ambient music from mathematical formulae. Calling it music is stretching it as it was more a form of structured noise. Some people like that sort of thing. The guy was not able to use his laptop, so it was all written on the board with some audio samples played on his phone.

I really enjoyed the day, but I was tired by the end and my back was sore. I went along to the 'after party' for a beer and more food before making my way home. I will try to get to future events and it would be good to see some more Hivers there. As well as organising our own events we can exploit others like this to get together.

Geek on!